We just pulled off a great seminar in Almedalen! Thanks to all the members of the panel! Thanks Alexandra for moderating! And a big thank you to all of you who came and contributed with questions and interesting perspectives at this well attended event. Below is a brief summary:

Why do we have a situation where Swedish companies experience reduce growth as a consequence of a lack of steady competence-supply of developers while we, at the same time, have a substantial amount of newly arrived developers around the country that are still unemployed? What does diversity mean for innovation?

These were two main questions discussed by the panel in Sync Accelerator’s event in Almedalen. Moderated by Alexandra Pascalidou, who really did not take any prisoners, the panel was challenged to discuss some tough questions regarding the workings of the Swedish job market.The panel agreed that diversity is important for optimizing competence -supply and spurring innovation and that, although the tech sector in Sweden is quite ahead the rest of the Swedish job market in terms of diversity, it still has some distance to cover before truly capitalizing on Sweden’s brain gain of recent years. Most recruitment is carried out within personal and familiar networks and of course, in such a context, being new to a country means starting at a disadvantage.

Substantiating this notion was a Big Data study of Swedish job ads produced by Nackademin which, according to CEO Mikeal Yngvesson, revealed how employers tend to all chase the same type of “ideal candidate“. as such leaving little room for diversity in many workplaces. Samer Al Moubayed, Swedish-Syrian Supertalent, and owner of Furhat Robotics gave a personal testimony to the importance of diversity for innovation in the workplace and a personal account of his journey from Syria to the tech sector of Sweden, via a doctorship at KTH. CMO of Microsoft, Karin Zingemark, gave an account of the idea behind #Welcome Talent and the importance of introducing newly arrived into professional networks of relevance. Johan Engström and Abdel El Hennawy of Sync Accelerator spoke about how they have managed to map out the skills of roughly 500 newly arrived IT specialists and managed to set up a talent matchmaking system that has met with a very positive response from a wide variety of companies, but also some scepticism e.g. are these IT specialist really that good? Will they function with our workplace culture? BigSpin’s CEO, Jonathan Persson and newly arrived Safinaz Awad gave an account of how easy it had been to be introduced to one another through Sync Accelerator. Safinaz – experienced with Java, PHP, HTML, Javascript and C++ – was working as a programmer for an e-publisher company in Damaskus when she had to abruptly leave the country with her family. Six months later, she was introduced to the tech startup Big Spin and after some successful interviews and testing sessions she was offered a full-time web developer position. “I can really recommend other companies to recruit newly arrived developers”, says Jonathan, “Not only is it important for society, it is important for the companies too as they get access to tech skills they really need“.

Sync Accelerator wants to thank all of the members of the panel and all of those who attended the event. See you next year in Almedalen!